With a hat tip to the Beatles for the title, I am proud to announce a couple of uncommon astronomical events scheduled for later this spring. No, I am not talking about the apocalypse scheduled by the science-illiterate for the end of the year. (Make sure you wear clean underwear for that one to make your mom proud.) No, I am talking about a couple of sun-related events: a transit of Venus and a near-total solar eclipse.

The first to occur is the near-total eclipse of the sun. Coming May 21, 2012 it will be a near-total event in the Black Rock Desert less than 100 miles north of me. Yes, it's the same desert where the annual Burning Man festival occurs every Labor Day weekend. Even here in the big city, the eclipse should be pretty spectacular. Of course, DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN if you are thinking of witnessing this spectacle yourself. Hie your eyes to a local university, community college or even a high school with an astronomy class to find if they are going to have their telescopes with appropriate filters fired up.

Even if you don't live in northern Nevada, you don't have be the target of a Carly Simon song and fly your Lear Jet to Nova Scotia to see it. And we can only hope your experience is better than that of Monty Python's too. Visit NASA's website to see how much eclipse you get in your area. Below is a screen shot showing the details at the best closest spot to me.

Map courtesy NASA.gov.

The second event is the transit of Venus, which will be visible in my area the evening of June 5. A transit is mechanically pretty much the same as an eclipse, but on a much smaller scale, in that the disk of the transitor(?) isn't large enough to occlude the disk of the transitee. In other words, from the Earth, the size of Venus isn't large enough to hide the sun, it will only appear as a dot moving across it. Not exactly like the way The Police sang about it on King of Pain way back in 1983, either. The most recent transit of Venus was in 2004. After the events of this coming June, the next such occurrence will be in 2117 - making it rather unlikely anyone reading this will be around for the next installment.

Interestingly, a couple of hundred years ago, the transit was a way for astronomers to measure the size of the solar system. How? Observers from two disparate locations on Earth would see two distinct paths of Venus across the sun. Using the slight difference in the length of time it takes Venus to move from one edge of the sun to the other, they were able to calculate the distance from earth to the sun, and thus the size of our solar system. Once again, science and math charging to the rescue.

Again, DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN - not even for just a second. I cannot stress this enough. You WILL damage your eyes, and I will take it as a personal affront, since you will no longer be able to easily read the pithy wisdom of my words.

For gobs more information on the transit, visit transitofvenus.org. Alas for my hordes of Brazilian, Argentinian, and Chilean readers, the transit will not be visible to you at all.